[CMake] cpack bundle generator qq

[Timothy M. Shead]

David Cole wrote:
> What Clinton wants, though, is the ability to just put his make install 
> tree into the .dmg, not put it inside another bundle. His make install 
> tree contains a bundle already.

Ahhh ... I see the distinction now.  Good point.  If you had the 
hypothetical "dmg" generator:

* You could install executables generated with MACOSX_BUNDLE to "/", and 
they will Just Work.

* You could put additional top-level files (such as READMEs) in the dmg 
by installing them to "/".  This is only doable in the current bundle 
generator by installing files to "../..", and I don't know if that is 
actually supported by CMake or not :)  The /Applications symlink would 
still have to be created by the generator, I think.

* You could create bundles of arbitrary complexity (my use case), by 
using INSTALL() commands that create the bundle hierarchy directly.  So

INSTALL(TARGETS foo DESTINATION /foo.app/Contents/MacOS/foo)
INSTALL(TARGETS a b DESTINATION /foo.app/Contents/Resources/bin)
INSTALL(FILES dependencies DESTINATION /foo.app/Contents/Resources/lib)

... and so on ...

I think the major drawback to this approach is that you end-up with one 
set of INSTALL() paths for bundles, and a different set for other 
platforms.  Worse, you have to understand bundle internals to put 
external dependencies where they can be used by individual bundles.  For 
me, this is a show-stopper because not one of my projects is so simple 
that it doesn't have any third-party dependencies.  The goal with the 
bundle generator is to abstract away platform differences so that one 
set of INSTALL() paths works everywhere.

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Timothy M. Shead
Data Analysis & Visualization (1424)
Sandia National Laboratories
505-284-0139